The new emperor of Rome might not use his power to become a gift- giving monarch or an aristocrat vaunting his generosity to his subjects and asserting his eminence above them and the institutions of the state. Rather, he might become an executive of the Roman people – a man who would restore to them what was theirs by right.50 In particular, after Nero’s extravagance, the new emperor needed to be an efficient administrator and organizer, a leader who could bring discipline to the armies after the civil war, and a statesman who could balance the books of Rome’s economy by raising money judiciously and spending it wisely. Part of his proving ground would be the fate of Nero’s hubristic folly – the Golden House.
Galba lived in Nero’s palace only briefly; Otho spent money putting the finishing touches to it; and Vitellius and his wife ridiculed its grandiose decoration. Nero’s ultimate successor, however, had the place demolished, keeping just a small section of it. The father of a new dynasty ordered the palace lake to be drained and here inaugurated the construction of a new, far more public building; a monument not to a private king, but to the Roman people: the Colosseum. The story of who that new emperor was and how he came to power is entwined with the next great revolution in Roman history.
IV
REBELLION
In the southeast corner of the Forum in Rome today stands a triumphal arch dedicated to Titus, the tenth Roman emperor. At each corner of the pedestal are Ionic columns with flowering Corinthian heads, and above the monument’s beautifully sculpted cornice is the full, weighty mass of its lintel. It is believed that the arch was once crowned with a glorious statue of Titus on a chariot pulled by elephants. Worn and majestic, the solemn stones that remain of the original arch suggest to passers-by all that is austere, noble and beautiful about the classical world. And yet on the shaded inside of the arch lies a very different story. The ancient panel reliefs that line the passageway through the arch depict in detail one of the most violent, brutal and offensive acts of atrocity in the history of the empire: the Roman sack of Jerusalem in the summer of AD 70.
The panels show Roman soldiers triumphantly carrying booty stolen from the most important site of the Jewish faith, the Temple of Jerusalem. In their hands are some of the most sacred Jewish treasures: the golden menorah (seven-branched candelabrum), silver trumpets and the table for the shewbread. These possessions were so holy that for centuries only priests were allowed to lay eyes on them. And yet depicted here, on the Arch of Titus, the hallowed objects are not only being stolen and defiled by Gentiles, but their theft is celebrated as the greatest triumph of Titus’s career. Just as the Arch of Titus has stood as a commemoration of that great Roman triumph throughout the centuries to this day, it also testifies to that cruel act of imperialism.
The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem was the climax to one of the most dramatic turning points in the history of Rome. The Jewish revolt of AD 66–70 in the Roman province of Judaea involved the single greatest military campaign against a provincial people in the history of the Roman empire. In AD 66 Rome controlled a territory that stretched from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea, and from Britain to the Sahara. Judaea had fallen under Roman control in 63 BC. And yet, as the imperial government of Rome was to find out in the rebellion of the Jews, the greatest challenge they faced was not conquering and creating their foreign provinces, but administering them. For the Romans, as for many imperial powers through the ages, winning the peace was a much more complex affair than winning the war.
The rebellion of the Jews demonstrated the greatest problems of imperialism: the place, if any, of nationalism within the empire; the coexistence of two religions – emperor worship (a key part of Roman paganism) and Judaism; and, above all, the issue of money – who paid taxes to whom, who profited from the empire and who didn’t. Indeed, it was this last question of who really benefited from the celebrated pax Romana (Roman Peace), from the protection of being a province within the Roman empire, that would ultimately spark the revolt. The rebellion of Judaea raised all these questions in the most graphic and vivid way for one simple reason: between AD 66 and 70 they led to a war that became a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of people. The hard fact of Roman imperialism was that, if challenged and if necessary, the emperor was prepared to unleash a monster. To put down the revolt, the empire released the ferocity and firepower of almost a quarter of the entire Roman army.
At the heart of the story, however, lie highly personal motivations and actions, and an extraordinary reversal of fortune. For the man appointed to command Roman forces in Judaea would seize the opportunity of the war to justify a bid for absolute power. His reward for crushing the Jewish rebels would be to rise from obscurity and disgrace to become emperor – at least that’s how he presented it. With his claim secured, he would found an entirely new dynasty and lay the foundations for Rome’s glorious golden age of peace. His name was Vespasian. However, success in the war against the Jews and the bid to win power in Rome was not achieved alone. For this Vespasian would come to depend on his son Titus, the man who would succeed him first as commander in Judaea and later as emperor. The legacy of father and son survives to this day, not only in the triumphant Arch of Titus, but also in one of the greatest symbols of Roman power – the Colosseum.
A ROMAN PROVINCE
Some 120 years before the revolt of the Jews against Rome, Judaea was a small monarchical state ruled by a dynasty of high priests, populated mainly by Jews and centred on the holy city of Jerusalem. Previously, Judaea had been part of the Persian empire, and then part of the Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies and, later, Seleucids. The latter took their name from one of Alexander the Great’s Greek generals, Seleucus, who founded the new monarchy, and they ruled from the capital city of Antioch in Syria. With time the Seleucids came to encompass smaller kingdoms further south, such as Judaea. Eventually, however, the authority of the Seleucids, like that of the Persians, diminished, and Judaea next fell under Rome’s sphere of influence. Between 66 and 63 BC the general Pompey extended Roman control in the east by installing, in the place of Alexander the Great’s successors, client-kings loyal to Rome. The expansion brought Rome great opportunities for exploitation. She inherited both extraordinary wealth and, through the appropriation of Greek works of art, the cultural sophistication of the old Hellenistic world. But there was an even greater prize to be won. The Roman settlement of the east created a critical buffer zone between the Roman empire and her one great rival empire lying in modern-day Iran/Iraq: Parthia.
With the passing of a decree in Rome, Pompey made Syria a Roman province to be ruled directly from the capital, but in Judaea, instead of direct rule, he installed a client-ruler loyal to Rome. The most famous of these kings was Herod the Great. Under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, however, the system of provincial administration across the empire changed. Some provinces were still governed as they had been during the republic: consuls or praetors, after they had served a year in office in Italy, were given the command of a province for between one and three years. The great change, however, was that Augustus took the provinces that bordered the non-Roman world into his own care. These ‘imperial provinces’ each received a garrison of Roman legions and each was governed by a deputy especially appointed by the emperor. Syria thus became an imperial province, and by AD 6, after the expulsion of the client-ruler Archelaus, so did Judaea. Thus it remained, with one reversal of policy, until the troubles of AD 66.